A man wears a face mask as he walks by a picture of the late Chinese leader Chairman Mao Zedong in a nearly empty shopping area on February 14, 2020 in Beijing, China. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

A year and a half into the COVID-19 pandemic, the world knows remarkably little about the origins of the virus that has killed nearly 4 million people and wrought untold damage across the globe. Investigations of the outbreak's epicenter in Wuhan have been marred by the Chinese government's obfuscation and deceit.

Despite this suspicious behavior—and the absence of clear evidence confirming the natural zoonotic origin hypothesis favored by Chinese authorities—media and public health elites have aggressively dismissed the alternative hypothesis that the virus emerged as a result of a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  

While others were held captive by groupthink, Hudson experts were "thinking the unthinkable" and raising questions that others were afraid to ask. At the forefront of the issue has been Senior Fellow David Asher, who led the State Department's inquiry into COVID-19's origins, and other Hudson experts who spearheaded investigations into the lab-leak theory.

How can the U.S. government begin to grapple with these questions? You won't want to miss David's forward-looking Wall Street Journal op-ed,  "The World Needs Answers on Covid's Origin." Below are several key news items featuring Hudson experts that will get you up to speed on this once-in-a-century story, as well as two prescient pieces from 2020 calling for the CCP to be held accountable for its malign handling of the pandemic.

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In the Wall Street Journal, David Asher outlines the Chinese government's efforts to obstruct inquiries into the origins of COVID-19:

"From the beginning, China crushed or co-opted good-faith efforts to understand the virus’s origin and spread. It made whistleblowers disappear, refused to turn over blood samples from early patients and destroyed the wet market. The Communist Party successfully pushed to exclude Taiwan from the 2020 World Health Assembly—depriving the world of the chance to learn from a state that had successfully contained the virus.

Beijing spread misinformation by claiming that American soldiers visiting Wuhan had brought the virus to China. Perhaps most notably, the party played puppet master to the feckless World Health Organization investigation into the outbreak."

The Washington Post examines the Biden administration's decision to task the intelligence community with investigating the pandemic's origins:

Staff members at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick in the fall of 2019 with symptoms that resembled COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, as well as seasonal illnesses. David Asher, a former State Department official who led the department’s investigation into the pandemic’s origins, described the sick lab workers as “the first known cluster that we’re aware of, of victims of [what] we believe to be COVID-19.”

Asher added, “There is a possibility it was influenza, but I’m very doubtful that three people in highly protected circumstances in a level-three laboratory working on coronaviruses would all get sick with influenza that put them in a hospital or in severe conditions all in the same week, and it didn’t have anything with the coronavirus. That’s highly hard to believe.”

Financial Times examines the Biden administration’s increasing attention on the lab-leak origin theory:

"The Biden administration has now studied the mountain of disturbing evidence that we were confronted with in the last few months of the Trump administration," said David Asher, who led a State Department investigation into the origins of Covid. "It is jaw dropping. And as they have noted, a great deal more needs to be assessed."

Vanity Fair notes the chilling effect of the Lancet Journal's statement dismissing the lab-leak theory as a "conspiracy theory," which discouraged   scientific inquiry into possible non-zoological origins of COVID-19:

Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV  [Wuhan Institute of Virology] itself. David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry. He said it soon became clear that “there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy” inside the federal government.

New York Magazine's Intelligencer quotes Senior Fellow Miles Yu on the internal pressure within the State Department to dismiss the lab-leak theory:

One State Department official wrote that his team was warned not to investigate the origins of the pandemic because it would “open a can of worms.” Miles Yu, the State Department’s principal China strategist, tells Eban, “Anyone who dares speak out would be ostracized.” After former CDC head Robert Redfield said he believed the virus originated in a lab, he tells Eban “I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis.” In retrospect, the error is clear enough all along. The origins of the pandemic were always murky, and the strongest reason to dismiss lab-leak out of hand—that the Wuhan lab supposedly had airtight security protocols—was more rumor than fact.

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